Hunting The Muse

Blog Comments

Jon Udell: Annoying habit #1 - Jon discusses comments in terms of both discussion boards and blogs.

I find discussion boards kind of annoying because you have to look for them. You usually have to be in the explicit mood to have an opinion and share with a group of people, and then seek them out. When really comments are reactions.

But Jon mentioned that "per-item" comments annoy him and it made me realize they annoy me too. Comments aren't always in reaction to just one item, they are in reaction to a concept. I might post several blog items about a certain concept or category, and they all have comment forms. You'll notice that in several more popular blogs (grr) that conversations span several comment trees and it gets confusing really fast.

So I think what is needed is the ability to group blog items into a family that all have one comment board. When you blog an entry, you pick the comment board it is routed to.

All of this suggests to me another reason for a blog having more than one view. The only common existing view right now is reverse chronological. There are several other possible views, though.

One thing that will also become more popular and desired over time is a BlogSummary service where a collection several posts are summarized and people can read the summary. Posted by Curt at March 4, 2003 03:13 PM